


Her Name Was Divya

by YouCanJive



Series: Time is the Longest Distance (Between Two Places) [12]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-27 18:51:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20765258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouCanJive/pseuds/YouCanJive
Summary: In which soulmates meet and Darcy thinks about the future.





	1. Divya

Her name was Divya.

Gabby’s car had been making a weird, gurgling noise and she had asked Darcy to take a look at it.

Lisa and Darcy had given her a hard time about the physics major asking the poli-scientist to fix her car for her, but they did it out of love (or so they assured Gabby). The three were living together in a triple and their friendship had been getting stronger than ever.

So Darcy had grabbed her toolbox and followed Gabby out to the parking lot. She’d made Gabby drive around a bit until the sound came up again, to get a better idea of what it was, exactly, and then she’d gotten to work.

Gabby was playing DJ while she sat sideways on the driver’s seat, door open and legs stretched out to soak up the faint rays of the early spring sun.

Darcy had popped the hood of the car and was leaning over the car’s gizzards (as Gabby insisted on referring to anything under the hood) when she’d come up to Darcy and said hi.

“Hey, Darcy! Car trouble?”

Darcy looked up and smiled, standing upright and leaning back gently against the car as she tried to rub some of the oil off her hands into the old towel she kept with her tools.

“Hi, Divya,” Darcy greeted cheerfully. Divya had also declared a poli-sci major at the end of their freshman year and they had a couple classes together. “Just helping out a friend. This is my roommate Gabby,” she pointed back at Gabby, who stood up and walked around the car door to meet the newcomer, hand outstretched. “Gabby, this is Divya.”

“I love your hair!” Divya gushed as she shook Gabby’s hand.

Darcy watched as Gabby, who always took what to Darcy seemed like hours conditioning, twisting, braiding, wrapping, and generally caring for her (really, truly, legitimately) beautiful hair, beamed back at her.

“Thanks,” Gabby retorted, “I grew it myself.”

Divya dropped the coffee cup she’d been holding.

Those had been the magic words, the old-as-time call and response that bound Gabby and Divya together. And that, by extension, brought Divya into the fold, turning the inner trio into a quartet.

And Darcy was _happy_ about it. She really was.

She was happy for Gabby, and for Divya, and for the two of them together.

She liked Divya and she liked having her around. And she and Gabby were taking things slowly and were being very considerate of their respective friends, making sure to spend time individually with them and keep up the traditions and little rituals they’d shared before their soulmate had come along, in addition to spending time together and bringing their lives and groups of friends together.

They were the picture of a healthy, happy soulbond.

And if Darcy sometimes felt a little jealous – of their getting to spend time together like this, of how easy they made it look, of how public they could be about their relationship – she was absolutely not going to let it show.

Besides, she knew – she _knew _– things weren’t as easy for Gabby and Divya as she was making it out to be, that there were still people who turned up their nose – or worse – at visibly queer or interracial couples, let alone both, soulmates or not.

When she thought of that she felt even guiltier for resenting the apparent ease of their relationship.

(And she knew she’d promised Tony to tell him when something happened, when anything was wrong or… well, not wrong, but when she felt _off _or needed to talk.

But how could she tell Tony she was jealous or sad over somebody else’s soulbond?

It wasn’t like there was anything wrong with theirs. She loved Tony and she loved their friendship. She just… sometimes wished things were a little easier, was all.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends!  
I got married, moved to yet another country, got back to writing my dissertation, went through some terrible writers' block, and now I'm back !  
Thank you all for your messages and good wishes. I'll sit down to answer all your comments today and tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm sorry for the delay and that this is short, but I do hope you enjoy it.  
I beat the writers' block by writing out (what I hope you all will think is) a super juicy and lengthy story for the events of the first Avengers movie, though, and now I'm really excitedly writing towards that. I'm trying to publish these pieces chronologically, so you won't see it for a little while, but just know it's there, just waiting... So much needs to happen for Tony and Darcy before we get there, though!  
The events of Iron Man, however, are right around the corner, and may well start in the next story I post. Keep an eye out for that!


	2. The Return of the Late Night Conversations

But Darcy couldn’t let it go.

After a couple weeks of thinking on it, on what her relationship with Tony was, what it could be, what it would be…

Was she never going to get to talk about Tony to anyone but her parents and Rhodey?

Were they always going to have to spend their time in secret, in the privacy of one of their homes, with careful plans and excuses to keep everyone else away?

Would Tony even be able to come to her graduation, and would she ever be able to celebrate a birthday with him, or stand by his side at one of the Maria Stark Foundation galas that she knew took so much out of him?

After weeks of worrying about their future, then convincing herself it would all be alright, only to wake up the next day full of anxiety again, Darcy had had enough.

She needed to talk about it. And, ok, she didn’t really want to have a conversation about her anxieties over her soulmate relationship _with _her soulmate. But she did want to have it with her best friend, who would listen without judgment and want the best for her. And that was Tony, soulmate or not.

She talked herself out of it twice. Then, lying on her bed at two in the morning and unable to fall asleep, her mind weighing the worst possible outcome of having this conversation against the worst outcome of _not_ having it, Darcy found herself walking down to the common room, holding the phone to her ear before she’d even noticed she had moved.

“Howdy-do, Darcy-Lou.”

Despite the nervousness she was feeling, Darcy smiled instantly in response to Tony’s familiar voice and greeting.

“Hey, Tony.”

At the other end of the country, Tony closed his eyes, pulled away from his work bench, and took a deep breath, his every muscle seeming to loosen. It’d been a little while since Darcy had called him, rather than the other way around, and he hadn’t realized how much tension that’d been causing him until JARVIS had let him know he had an incoming call from her.

“How’s life?”

“Oh, you know. Lifey.” Tony snorted on the other end of the line and Darcy’s lips twitched. “You know things are always more or less the same around here.”

“Could our college experiences be any more different?” Tony wondered out loud.

“Please. Even if Rhodey hadn’t told me about it, I wouldn’t believe for one second you were out partying during your undergrad years. I bet you fell asleep at your desk most nights, bent over a handful of loose pieces and wire.”

“You don’t know my life,” Tony grumbled good-naturedly, even though she so clearly did.

“Well, that’s why I’m calling! So you’ll tell me about it. How’re things going?”

It was much of the same on his end, too: working on some new designs, Pepper chasing him down to get him to go into the office and actually do his job, preparing some talk or other he was meant to present at an engineering school the next week.

Add in a couple stories about his robots’ shenanigans and a very edited retelling of his evening with one of the women he’d met while out to dinner a couple nights ago and Darcy was fully caught up on Tony’s life within minutes.

And then came the silence, because Darcy had had a very specific purpose in calling, but she was hesitating now. And Tony could read her silences all too well by this point.

“Out with it, Darce,” he finally prompted, and Darcy didn’t even pretend not to know what he was talking about.

“I’ve just…” she hesitated, looking for the right words, “been thinking a lot about us. And the future. _Our_ future.”

“Ok…” Tony retorted, waiting for her to say more.

But Darcy couldn’t think of how exactly to say what she wanted to ask, much as she’d been trying to find the perfect words, so instead it just burst out of her entirely unpolished: “Are we going to have to hide for the rest of our lives?”

Tony let out his breath with a loud exhalation.

He couldn’t deny he’d been wondering when Darcy might bring up this issue. He’d actually been a little surprised it hadn’t happened sooner and was not at all surprised that it was coming now. Not after Darcy had told him so much over the last few weeks about Gabby and Divya and how happy they were together.

Still, he didn’t know what to say.

Openly acknowledging Darcy as his soulmate would endanger her. Just acknowledging her as an important person to him, not even as his soulmate, would do so.

People would try to hurt her to get to him. He’d had experienced that first-hand when he was younger, and the Stark name (and fortune) had been nowhere near as well-known then.

The press would also be all over her, both in an effort to learn more about him and simply to sell more papers.

Her privacy would be gone.

She’d not be able to trust anyone.

Every aspect of her life would be put on display and become a matter of public discussion, from what she wore to what classes she took to who she spoke with.

He knew so, so intimately what that could do to a person.

He couldn’t let it happen to her.

As Darcy spoke and laid out her case, though, he couldn’t deny their current situation was not ideal, either.

Not only because it was clearly hurting Darcy.

But because he couldn’t really say he was happy with it either. He wanted more of her in his life, too.

He’d been content to place Darcy’s safety above his own happiness and selfish desires to spend more time with her, to accompany her in all the things she wanted to do, to be there for the important moments of her life, not just for her retellings of them.

But Darcy was clearly unhappy, which only meant the current system wasn’t working and he would have to find a way to keep her safe _and _happy.

He could do that. He was Tony Stark, after all.

Together, they worked through endless possible plans, timelines, security mechanisms, and more contingency plans.

They decided to think some more on their own, then to talk with Rhodey about it, and possibly even, as a first step, bring the topic to Happy and Pepper. Maybe.

It was nothing concrete yet, just a promise to _try_, but that had been enough to bring Darcy to tears of relief that Tony awkwardly and anxiously tried to soothe over the phone (while kicking himself for not realizing this was all bothering Darcy enough to make her cry like this).

Hours later, after the conversation had shifted from plans for their future to Darcy’s specific plans for her future after graduation, then to what Tony would have done after school if he hadn’t had SI, then to how Darcy’s parents were doing, then back to their future, and on to fifty other topics, Darcy and Tony finally said goodnight.

The first faint rays of sunlight were starting to creep in through the common room windows and Darcy had no idea how she was going to get through her classes that day, but this was the lightest her heart had felt in a long time.

“Ok, I’m going to find some coffee now. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Darce.” Then, before she could hang up: “Hey, I’m really glad you called. Thank you for telling me.”

“Thank you for listening,” Darcy replied, her voice thin with exhaustion and emotion. Again, a short silence, but Tony waited, knowing there was more. “You can tell me things, too, you know?”

“I know. Maybe another day.”

**Author's Note:**

> Now please excuse me while I go read the Iron Man script one or seventy-five times to help me write the next few installments...


End file.
